Centering Youth Lives in Science Teacher Education

By: Christina Restrepo Nazar, Ph.D., Assistant Professor, Science Education, California State University Los Angeles
Angela Calabrese Barton, Ph.D., Professor, Educational Studies Department, University of Michigan

High school students work in a science lab. Photo by Allison Shelley for American Education: Images of Teachers and Students in Action. Download from Flickr.

What justice-centered challenges do youth from minoritized communities face in learning science?

Research shows that meaningfully supporting youths’ community and out-of-school experiences in STEM can provide significant opportunities for school science learning (Birmingham et al., 2017). Despite such evidence, there are limited opportunities for pre- and in-service teachers to learn how to connect STEM learning with students’ cultural repertoires to support engaging in meaningful work in classrooms.

To begin to connect the dots, we engaged in a three-paper dissertation study—with separate but interrelated research questions, methods, and analysis— the results of which are contextualized in this blog.

Theoretical Framework and Knowledge Base

To understand how beginning teachers make sense of youths’ rich cultural practices and actions across space and over time, we draw upon social practice theory (SPT) (Holland & Lave, 2009). SPT provides insight into the tensions and competing narratives that influence actions in local practice. Holland and Lave (2009) refer to “two forms of history,” the personal and the institutional, as important in shaping people’s practices and interactions.  These forms of history, “history in person” and “history in institutionalized struggles,” are always present and in relation to the activities in which individuals participate. The intersection of these histories impacts both teachers and youths’ conceptions of what it means to engage in community-centered and meaningful STEM learning.

To further center the intersection of youth histories, we look towards Ladson Billings’ (2006) notion of the education debt as a backdrop for why it is important for science teacher educators to learn from youths’ lives. The education debt reminds us that inequities in science education are rooted in systemic practices and policies that favor whiteness. In science classrooms, forms of systemic racism that students encounter are many, and include policies and practices that structure what students learn and how and on what they are evaluated, among others. The education debt reminds us that efforts to disrupt systemic racism need to focus on remediating elements of the system. This is an important shift.

Equity-centered research in science education has tended to focus on remediating the individual student. For example, powerful studies of students’ cultural practices in science education exist. However, the focus of such work has been on how to bridge such knowledge and practice with that of science, such that students can more fully engage in the discipline as it is. In other words, the focus has been on how to help students “crossover” from their own cultural worlds to the worlds of science, as if these worlds are discontinuous, and with the onus of responsibility for transformation on the students. We suggest something different.

Methods

Data for these three related studies were collected between 2013-2018. For the first and third study, we employed critical ethnographic multiple case studies which focus on work “with” participants, rather than “on” or “for” them (Calabrese Barton, 2001).  The methodology provides an analytic lens in which to “politicize” the interaction between actors and the social structures through which they act.

Findings

Overall, findings showed that it is important that PSTs, in their learning to teach, understand what youth value about the work they do in school and in their communities. The first study showed that artifacts co-created with youth, including multimodal resources developed about their engineering design projects, challenged ways that PSTs saw youth as scientists and engineers while also sending explicit messages to PSTs about what it means to teach science meaningfully to youth in their communities (Nazar et al., 2018; Nazar et al., 2019).

One of the major findings in the second study that transitioned into the third showed that PSTs were able to critically re-examine the purposes and goals of science by layering and examining knowledge and practice from their own K-16 STEM experiences alongside the methods, community contexts, and youth multimodal artifacts. Because of this learning, PSTs challenged structures of power and privilege within their field classrooms. As the PSTs completed their field teaching semester during the methods course, they found ways to critically re-think and re-imagine their observations in support of upholding their field students’ views of science, increasingly seeking to connect these views with the youth cases. In one example, Sophia, a PST who participated in the course and was a focal case in study three, learned to challenge normative discursive practices in her field teaching classroom from experiences learned from Faith’s case. When Faith visited our course, she taught PSTs about her FANcy Hat and how the NASA Engineering Design Process used in most science classes did not represent her FANcy Hat’s engineering design process. This particular day, Faith worked closely with Sophia’s group. Faith explained:

By Faith showing the PSTs the big X drawn on the NASA engineering cycle, and teaching them about her own engineering design work—creating her own cycle, describing the process she took to create with community, and teaching the PSTs about it—Sophia and the other PSTs understood what it meant to engage in a type of engineering design process that was culturally relevant. It was an engineering process that upheld Faith’s knowing and being, including histories of her family and community when creating her FANcy Hat. She could not find meaningful ways to connect to the NASA engineering cycle; rather, her work showed that youth can (and do) create and sustain their own cultural repertoires of practice in K-12 schooling, despite not being legitimized for it, especially in science education.

Sophia, by learning from Faith’s work, recognized that this legitimacy was a missing link in her work as a science teacher. In her student teaching, she forged new opportunities to open space for students to create in her mentor teacher’s classroom. Sophia did this by challenging where learning takes place, such as moving design work from tables to the carpet; while challenging norms by opening up space for youth to create all around the classroom. Challenging behavioral approaches instituted in her mentor teacher’s classroom, Sophia no longer used engineering design time as a “reward,” perceived by students as a fun time but made it an important time for learning. She also stopped assigning roles (e.g. recorder, designer, etc.) based on teacher perceived abilities, and provided a variety of available materials—which were at one point itemized and distributed only to students who showed “promise” in their engineering design work. Sophia challenged and re-imagined a new classroom culture, desisting compliance-driven learning.

Sophia allowed youth to claim space and to direct their own engineering projects, asking for teacher support if necessary. In doing this, students were encouraged to use their native languages, including Arabic and Spanish, to design their sketch-ups and models and request feedback from peers and community members when engineering their designs. Sophia discussed her work in the classroom:

In study three, all the PSTs took different approaches to implementing justice-oriented science teaching practices based on differing contextual practice even if these orientations went in contradiction to the practices of their mentor teachers. In addition, in all three cases, opportunities for tension and allowing PSTs to grapple with them are what forged opportunities to imagine, enact or shape/reshape ways to support meaningful science learning for and with youth in their classrooms, significantly shifting their teaching practice in more justice-oriented ways.

Conclusions, Implications, and Significance

This work focuses on the importance of designing methods course alongside field experiences in support of critically engaging PSTs with cultural, historical, and social community underpinnings of youth in equitably consequential ways—by first and foremost centering youth in STEM learning.

• Preservice teachers – Results showed that learning to teach in a way that embraced youth’s home, community, school knowledge, experiences and practices can become consequential to PSTs developing imagined practices. The PSTs at Midwestern Research University were primarily white, middle class, and female. Most, if not all, in their post-course interviews for study two discussed that this was the first time in their education programs that they could clearly see how their privilege as white, middle class females could come into tension with the repertoires of practice of the youth they were teaching.
• Mentors – Further, as PSTs learned to generate justice-oriented pedagogical imaginaries in what they believed were supportive of youth’s equitable engagement in their science learning, they sought ways to enact those imaginaries, even if they contradicted the ways they were learning to teach in their field classrooms We often place the mentor teachers as experts in the mentor-mentee relationship in teacher education. However, when the youth are recognized as the experts instead, especially in the context of science, this greatly shifts who holds the knowledge.
• Teacher Educators – We need to develop methods and tools that support PSTs in taking an assets-based, disruptive, critical stance in their learning to teach across the lifespan. Given the ways science and science education have minoritized and gatekept students from an equitable science education, there needs to be an awareness towards one that values and upholds youth knowledge and practice as important resources for learning in STEM. It is imperative that PSTs are supported to learn to teach from youth lives by superimposing the youth’s knowledge and practices onto their own K-16 science experiences. Conversations on the education debt, science as a civil right, and the culture of power in science need to include conversations about race, class, gender and ability in STEM—and how one’s racialized, classed, and gendered experiences could be a result of accumulated capital or become educational debts for ourselves or others.
• Researchers – It is imperative that we investigate how justice-oriented dispositions require science teacher educators to shift views of the field from “windows” of opportunities into teaching (e.g. building connective experiences between methods and the PSTs’ field work) towards building a sociopolitical stance centered on youth knowledge and practice that begins in the early stages of preservice teacher development and carries into practice. PSTs need safe spaces, such as methods courses, to investigate these critical orientations as a part of learning to teach.
• Field of Teacher Education and STEM Education – Learning to embrace youth knowledge and practice can provide important avenues to challenge the unbalanced power dynamics between youth and teachers.

This work has serious implications, especially now for impacts on home/community/knowledge and practice through experiences with COVID-19, technological access to meaningful science learning experiences, and critical development of scientific literacy. It is imperative that teachers are educated to begin where youth are, especially in unpacking these pressing critical understandings and connections between science and community. These power dynamics can and should be disturbed. By providing frameworks like those which will continue to be developed from research presented in this blog, they give way to recognizing how race, class, gender, ability, and other hegemonic structures have contributed to historical gaps in STEM learning. Most importantly, we should recognize how youth are already teaching us how to challenge these hegemonic structures in practice.

Note: The research discussed in this blog is informed by Dr. Restrepo Nazar’s dissertation study, Youth as Teacher Educators:  Supporting Preservice Teachers in the Developing Youth Centered, Equity-Oriented Science Teaching Practices, for which she received AACTE’s 2020 Outstanding Dissertation Award.

Christina Restrepo Nazar, Ph.D., Assistant Professor, Science Education, California State University Los Angeles
crestre2@calstatela.edu

Christina Restrepo Nazar is an Assistant Professor of Science Education in the Division of Curriculum & Instruction at the California State University, Los Angeles. Her scholarly work includes researching and developing frameworks that support the development of youth and justice-oriented practices and dispositions in preservice teacher education. Her doctoral dissertation work, completed at Michigan State University (2018), was supported by the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship. Dr. Nazar won the American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education Outstanding Dissertation Award for work done with youth and preservice teachers as co-participants in research design. She has published in Science Education, Cultural Studies in Science Education, and has a book chapter forthcoming (with Angela Calabrese Barton) in the Handbook of Multicultural Science Education.

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Angela Calabrese Barton, Ph.D., Professor, Educational Studies Department, University of Michigan
angiecb@umich.edu

The research of Angela Calabrese Barton, a professor in the Educational Studies Department at the University of Michigan, is grounded in the intersections of teaching and learning science with an emphasis on equity and social justice. Her recent work takes place within three interrelated strands: 1) working within the intersection of formal/informal education in support of understanding and designing new possibilities for equitably consequential teaching and learning; 2) designing teaching-learning tools and experiences that promote more expansive learning outcomes, such as critical agency, identity work, and social transformation (as grounded within expanding disciplinary expertise); and 3) developing methodologies for embracing authentic “research + practice” work that attends to practitioner and youth voice, and critically engages the goals of equity and justice.

To read more about Dr. Calabrese Barton’s work, please visit her website.